Gender Socialization

Introduction

Gender socialization is the process by which individuals are taught and learn the values and norms associated with women's and men's roles in society. According to prevailing lay understandings of gender, individuals are born with a sex (i.e., female or male), but they must learn their gender (i.e., what it means to be a woman or a man). Through the process of gender socialization, individuals develop their gender identity, or their definition of themselves within this dichotomy—as either a woman or a man. Although most gender socialization takes place during childhood, socialization does not end there. Because gender is a social construction that pervades all social institutions, throughout the life course and in day-today interactions, individuals routinely navigate social expectations of girl/boy and woman/man and revise and maintain their gender identities as necessary. This entry describes theories of gender socialization, the “doing gender” perspective, agents of gender socialization, and diversity in families (Connell, 210).

Discussion and Analysis

Gender socialization is not an event so much as it is a process that depends on a range of variables in the culture and in intersubjective relationships. In Western cultures, the media industries shape some of the ways gender is perceived. However, the chapter will discuss the media in terms of their various subdivisions and functions and not simply their impact on gender socialization. While the media are hugely significant in structuring how audiences consume representations, they are not universal in their effects (Connell, 210).

Gender socialization occurs the moment a child is influenced by the social processes and cultural discourses that circumscribe male and female behavior. While biological and anatomical differences appear foundational in the processes of gendering, biology and anatomy are themselves constructed in relation to language and discourse. Processes of gendering initially take place via choice of names, the imposition of clothing, and the specific ways cultures address children. When de Beauvoir suggested that she became a woman, she highlighted how gender identities are socially formed in relation to the specific cultural and discursive structures. If gender, at the beginning of the 20th century, took shape around the discourses of religion, the family, and the school, today media representations also significantly influence how women's and men's identities are perceived (Connell, 210).

Socialization refers more generally to various sociocultural processes that provide individuals and groups with a sense of values and beliefs. Values are fundamentally linked to ideology and politics, but they also structure modes of behavior via media representations. Socialization is a twofold process, requiring, on one hand, agencies and structures whose function it shape social subjects and, on the other, citizens who are socially interpellated. More recently, socialization has been understood in the context debates surrounding the social construction of identity. Social constructionist perspectives, especially in light of work since Mary Mclntosh in sociology and Michel Foucault in the sphere of discourse theory, underline how the processes involved in acquiring the society's everyday norms of behavior do not come about by means of a single determining event or unique interpellation, but instead occur ...